Accounting for productivity growth in a small open economy: Sector-specific technological change and relative prices of trade

Many economies experienced a slowdown of measured productivity in the 2000s, coinciding with the commodity price boom. We use a multisector growth model for a small open economy to quantify the contribution of sector-specific technology and relative prices of trade to productivity slowdown. We show that the effective aggregate total factor productivity consists of two components: the weighted average of sector-specific technology, and the weighted averaged of domestic-export price ratios which reflect export costs. This extends the Domar aggregation result of Hulten (1978). When calibrated to the Canadian data, the model suggests that productivity slowdown was mainly attributed to two sectors: commodity; machinery and equipment. Cross-country data show that, in two thirds of countries that experienced productivity slowdown, slower productivity growth in sectors serving domestic market was a dominant factor, while in the other one third, reduced domestic-export price ratio played a major role.